


Moments and Might-Have-Beens

by Charis



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Challenge Response, Drabble Collection, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Milathos Appreciation Week, Prompt Fill, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-03-21 22:19:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 8,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3706157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charis/pseuds/Charis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collected Musketeers ficlets, written for challenges or just for fun. Mostly Athos and/or Milady-centric, because predictable author is predictable and has no shame.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Milathos Appreciation Week - Day 1

**Author's Note:**

> Dribs and drabs -- collecting various Musketeers ficlets I’ve written. 95% of these will almost certainly be Milady de Winter and/or Athos as the primaries. Right now, just responses to prompts for Milathos Appreciation Week over on Tumblr, a.k.a. the reason why I may not update Never and Always until this weekend, but there will certainly be more later.

> _Day 1 - I’m a glass case of emotion_

He’d wanted to die, when it happened. To lose in a single stroke the only two people he loved in this world, his only family, all hope of happiness -- it had been too much. But he didn’t deserve the peace that death would bring, and so he crawled into the bottle in an attempt to silence the world and drive everyone away. The horrible empty ache of solitude was no more than he deserved.

And then he’d woken up one day, uncomfortably lucid, and realised that he didn’t deserve this either. Drunkenness gives him more peace than he should be allowed; it is a death in its own way. It wasn’t enough that he not die -- no, his penance must be to live, for others when he cannot do it for himself.

So he lives, aching and raw and hollow within, cynical and distant and controlled without. He attempts to maintain space between himself and others, to at least keep that shred of sanity (because closeness is pain, emotional intimacy is the road to agony, and he’s loved and will never be that fool again), only to watch even that fail with time -- to brothers unsought and unexpected, and then, in the house where his illusions had been stripped away, to _her_.

She’s a fury in the torchlight, an avenging angel gilded by flames in her dress of blood. It’s easy and safe to hate her, and yet the rage knots in his stomach, tangles into his thoughts, wraps around him and threatens to choke him. When she curls her fingers around the chain of the locket, when the kiss steals his breath, it’s not hate alone that he struggles with. The emptiness is gone, and he’d thought nothing could be worse, but god in heaven, he feels too much and too deeply and it will break him before long …

He dies for pretence, and in that false death and the events that follow, he thinks to let her go. He feels lighter, and it’s easy to imagine that he’s succeeded.

When their eyes meet for the first time in months and he holds his tongue ( _fool_ , he swears silently, _fool_ , but what good would it have done to speak?) even as agony and ecstasy blossom again, he tells himself he should have known better. Without her he is empty, and with her he overflows, and it is as it has always been: there is no in-between.


	2. Milathos Appreciation Week - Day 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And once again a fic doesn’t go where I’d planned. This was originally going to have flashbacks. Those got derailed in favour of … well, Milady. Oops? Pre-Season 1, post-Athos becoming a musketeer. Milady-centric.

> _Day 2 - the past is never dead_

She leaves Paris on Maundy Thursday, a little before dawn. Richelieu is occupied with the services of Holy Week and just waves assent when she tells him she needs to go away on business. She borrows a horse from his stables, sets out as the shopkeepers are just starting to prepare for the day, sees the sun rise as she puts the fringes of the city behind her. There’s such a delight to this, a freedom to the breeze and the smooth gait of the horse as she traverses the rolling hills. It would be easy to keep riding, to put all that has happened behind her and go on, to England or the Netherlands or another far-away country. But she won’t -- she can’t, bound here by blood and too much history to ever extricate herself from, and it’s a pretty dream but nothing more.

She’d like to tell herself this little sojourn is about laying the past to rest, but though she may lie to others with glib facility she can’t afford to lie to herself. This is about digging up the bones of what was, because she _needs_ that memory fresh. He’s in Paris now, and even if they are unlikely to cross paths it would be too easy to love him again, even with everything that’s happened. And while she will carry tangible reminders of that day forever, right now she needs _more_.

She stops at nightfall, still several hours from Pinon -- less if she pushes her horse on the morrow, but she’s not due back in Paris until Sunday eve and she has plenty of time. There’s an inn at a fork in the road where she can blend in easily enough by calling on the tricks of a hard childhood, and on her circuitous path it’s far enough from Pinon that no one should recognise her. It’s a better night’s sleep than many she’s had.

First light sees her on the road once again. Midmorning, clear and full of birdsong, finds her on the hilltop high above the chateau where she had spent the best and the worst days of her life. She’s not here to see her former home, though, but the hill itself, still green with spring and carpeted with tiny blue flowers, and the single oak at its crest. Part of her had imagined the tree might have died in shame of what had occurred, but that had only been a passing fancy; she knows such things do not occur outside of fairy stories -- and she had left any part of her that once believed in those tales swinging on this tree.

She’d imagined too, once, that the past could be buried -- could no longer matter. She’d thought of the phoenix, of love as the flame that might burn out the stains of a childhood where she’d not had the luxury of scruples if she wanted to survive. For a time, she’d even believed …

Thomas had proved her wrong. And Athos -- Athos had just confirmed that no matter what the priests might say, stains on the soul could never be erased. That the past cannot be killed. That salvation is the greatest lie, and love its wickedest tool.

She is _his_ past, and she swears -- here, now, on a hillside where an idyll had been swept away under blood -- that she will bring all the sins he’d thought buried home to roost.


	3. Milathos Appreciation Week - Day 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Swear to god, I scrapped about six beginnings for today. Either this theme and I are not buddies or today was a Bad Writing Day – I’m leaning towards the latter.  
> The poem is [Catullus 85](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_85).

> _Day 3 - revenge is an act of passion_

It had been easy, when she did not love him. Anne de Breuil had loved Olivier d’Athos de la Fère, but Anne had died on a tree (had died in the dark-panelled room where her beloved husband had refused to even look at her, blood on her hands and tears in her eyes), and she is a different woman now. Milady de Winter, the cardinal’s assassin, lives for vengeance and drinks deep of the bitter draught of hate, and does not spare a thought for those who get in her way. For her revenge, she blackens her soul willingly and without regret.

It had been easy --

When did it start? An alley, a courtroom, their old home as flames licked around them? When he kissed her against a wall, screamed accusations, turned willingly into her blade? She cannot say; she cannot think of it. She will see him dead and her ( _former_ ) self avenged, and then -- And then. There is no room in her now for a future, when the flames consume everything each time she sees him.

She thinks of lines read once, a slim volume of Latin poetry borrowed from the cardinal’s study. _I feel it happen, and I am torn apart_ , they had said, and she had not understood then. She does now.

She loves, and she hates, and she will destroy him even if the act rips her apart as well, because these feelings eat her from the inside out and there is nothing left inside this shell of a woman she wears besides the need to end this. He deserves no more than death for what he did to her.

(The woman she is now deserves no less than the same. They are mirrors, echoes, different and yet fundamentally linked, even now, and that will destroy her as surely as the rest of this.)

“I made her what she is,” he says as she kneels in the dirt, and she glares up at him and trembles with emotions she can no longer separate. And --

He walks away, and she understands. To destroy her would be to destroy himself, and he will not do that (does not need to, when he destroys who she has made herself into just as surely with his words -- for it is _Anne_ he loved, and she is not sure who she is now). She is empty, uncertain, rudderless, and all the love and hate that she still feels suddenly mean nothing.

_Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?_ the poem had asked. The answer it gave is more true than she had ever realised.

In this moment, she knows _nothing_.


	4. Milathos Appreciation Week - Day 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I need to give up trying to plan out what I’m going to do for any of these prompts and just let whatever happens happen. It seems to work better for these sorts of short pieces, especially when I’m giving myself a time limit.  
> Athos-centric this time – Athos and his issues and his alcohol. An [orgy of regret](http://myalchod.tumblr.com/post/114186711246/ranting-at-squirrelswithmakeup-while-watching), indeed. XD  
> My favourite Tumblr tag for this one? _#go home Athos you're drunk_

> _Day 4 - who else can we trust?_

It’s never been about trust.

He’d realised once, in the depths of his darkest days, that he could never believe that a word she’d told him was real. If they had been true, then her pleas of innocence might have been as well, and it would mean that he is as wretched a man as he sometimes thinks himself. (He believes it too often as it is, though it is easier to ignore those thoughts when she is being insufferable, taking a delight in flaunting her new-found fortune. In a strange sad fashion, he is almost grateful to the king.)

It’s never been about trust, because she never gave him cause to believe her words true.

When she comes to them, disheveled and half-dressed and every bit a woman in command of her surroundings despite the tinge of desperation, he balks. Duty and emotion collide for the first time in years, and he can’t believe the captain is willing to trust _her_ , except that they have no choice. This is in her own best interests, she reminds them coolly, and that restores his equilibrium, because with that motive firmly in place it’s no longer about trusting her -- it’s about believing that this will benefit her, and it’s undeniable fact that Louis’ death would drop her back into the dirt.

It’s not about trust, because (he believes) he knows what drives her.

But she falls anyway -- they all do -- and though he means it when he tells her she has his respect, he dares mean nothing deeper. To offer her the money he has is as much about self-preservation as it is about pity; that day he had seen something of Anne again, perhaps for the first time, and it is a chink in armour already fragile that he can ill-afford. With her gone, he will be safe once again. He cannot --

It’s not about trust, because a viper cannot be trusted; no matter how sweetly it may speak, poison is in its nature.

But he saw _Anne_ , or something of her, and no matter how he tries to convince himself otherwise he doesn’t think it was an act. And he can’t bear the thoughts and the memories, and so the hours he does not spend on duty, he drinks.

She finds him -- she always seems to do so, no matter how he hides. There is something intimately familiar in the way she steals a gulp of his wine, but the demand that follows reminds him well of what they both are, and he just flings back at her all the hurt she has raised in him -- tears apart any nascent understanding, hisses cruel words he knows will cut as he rises. Duty has always been his cross to bear; small wonder she does not understand. There will never be a middle where they can meet -- there had never been, except in her lie.

It’s not about trust, because he can’t afford to trust her.

(It always has been.)


	5. Milathos Appreciation Week - Day 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Late Season 2 shading into nonspecific future things -- framed in my head thanks to some of the Buckingham speculation on Tumblr but never elaborated on in any manner. Just the inevitable issues. XD Athos POV.

> _Day 5 - together we can do so much_

They have spent more of their marriage apart than together. The sweet madness of young love aside, what time they _have_ been together has been largely conflict, whether they were trying to harm each other or an outside party dependant only on circumstance. She should be no different to him than any other woman now that her lies have been exposed and he realises how little he knew of who she _really_ was (was it _all_ lies?), but his body remembers hers even after five, six, seven years -- knows motion, presence, reacts on a subconscious level.

He notices it -- _truly_ notices it -- first when they fight side by side to rescue the royal family. While the woman before him is more than half stranger, muscle memory has him moving with her, around her, working together in an easy way that his him thoroughly nonplussed when he reflects on it later. It should have been impossible, because all that passed between them was a lie, but --

If he noticed it then it’s even more pronounced as they creep into the Louvre in search of the Queen. The tunnels she leads them through are dim and close, but he finds himself attuned enough to her that he has no difficulty following. It makes him wonder -- a sudden thought, out of place and altogether inappropriate in the midst of such activities -- whether there had been more truth to what she’d shown as Anne than he (either of them?) had ever realised.

Rochefort’s study doesn’t help. Alone with her in the small hideaway, surrounded by her warmth and enveloped in perfume, that instinctual knowledge sharpens, only exacerbated by the hyper-awareness spawned from danger. He knows the rhythms of her somehow even now, recognises that her heart is beating faster not only from fear, remembers (vividly, so vividly) that sharp inhalation in very different circumstances.

To kiss her is the most natural thing in the world. And as she moves with him, angles her head and clutches at him and widens her stance so he can press closer, _just so_ , it's clear that she too remembers, knows, is connected. It's as if something loosens in his chest, an uncertainty he'd hardly been aware of.

 _I am bound to you as you are to me._ Her words come back to him later, bitter and fond all at once, and he understands much better than he ever has before.

When they meet again -- when anger and passion and regret drive them into each other's arms months later, after war and misunderstandings and duty pulled them apart once more -- he holds her face in his hands and whispers the truth he's learned in those lonely months against her lips. _Together we are so much more._

"Come home," he says, more than half a plea. She's sweet and familiar in his arms and the fire that burns between them can destroy or warm, but he's willing to chance that. The months apart have been a revelation.

For her too, it seems, because her hand twists in his doublet to haul him back in, and the taste of her mouth (familiar despite time and distance, as all of her proves to be again and again, and there is more of the golden past in them than either of them will ever say) is answer as much as the single word she breathes before they meet.


	6. Milathos Appreciation Week - Day 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to write some conversational thing with might-have-beens and paths not taken, but, well ... look, Musketeers involves swords. That makes a Highlander AU practically mandatory, doesn't it? XD  
> I've taken some liberties with timelines relative to the show, because five years isn't that much time when your life is measured in longer spans.

> _Day 6 - and maybe in another universe, I let you_

She dies the first time at his hands, hung from an old oak on a hill above the chateau de la Fère. The last thing she sees is pain and anger and regret warring in his eyes before her neck snaps.

The next thing she sees are stone walls; the next face is one that she will come to know all too well in the following years.

She sees him over the years that follow from a distance, but her mentor has been clear that she is not to go near him and for now, at least, she obeys. She knows that when they do meet it will be because she is that man’s trump card in his shadowy war for power, but admits to herself in the secret fastness of her heart that she does not know what she will do when the time comes. Love and hate tangle in her breast, and she understands in those moments how he could kill her in cold blood and yet grieve for her all the same.

She learns, in the meantime -- studies tactics, science, history, philosophy, anything she can get her hands on. She spends long hours drilling in the salle, longer hours in the library. The cardinal wants her to lie low and she is content to oblige ... for now. There is enough here to keep her occupied.

When they meet again, for the first time in fifteen years, she feels him before she sees him -- feels the hair at the nape of her neck lift, feels the air thick with static like from a summer thunderstorm. And when she turns her eyes lock with his, and there is a roaring filling her ears, and her legs are suddenly unsteady. She leans back against the wall behind her, managing to make the gesture languid rather than weak. “Comte de la Fère,” she drawls out.

He steps closer; his eyes are sharp and blue and hawklike, betraying nothing, fixed unwaveringly on her face. There is a subtle menace to his presence that she doesn’t remember. “Comtesse,” he replies, voice rich with irony.

Ah, _dieu_ , he can still make her burn after all those years. She understands now that he is her weakness. With what is to come she cannot let him see that, and so she curves her lips into a sharp-edged smile. “What a surprise you are. I did not expect this.” The subtle inflection leaves no doubts as to what she means.

“The feeling is mutual, I assure you.” He stops two paces away, gaze darting down to the velvet ribbon about her throat. “It was that day, then.” The words are almost a question.

Her turn to move now, whip-swift, closing the distance between them. She lays her hand on his cheek, feeling the rough texture of his beard and the warmth of the skin beneath it through the thin leather of her glove. Leaning in further, so her lips just brush his ear, she whispers, “You should have used a headsman, Olivier.”

He jerks back as if burned; his hand closes about her wrist, tight enough to be painful. When his eyes meet hers again, anger has darkened them. “And you should have stayed away, Anne. What makes you think I won’t take on that duty myself now?”

_Nothing,_ she thinks, but she’s been trained well and none of that uncertainty shows on her face. Instead her smile softens even as it broadens. “My dear husband, you are more than welcome to try. But as you are not the only one the years have changed, you may mislike the outcome.”

His free hand twitches towards his blade, but he makes no more than that one abortive motion. He’s different, in more than just the weariness etched into his face. When they had married he had been young, naïve; when he had executed her, rage and betrayal were at the forefront. There is a resolution and a canniness in him now that makes her wonder what he’s seen since they parted ways -- and a brittleness too, one she recognises all too well from within herself. Is that where broken love and trust have left them?

He is still looking down at her, though, and he is very close, close enough to burn. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he says, low and fierce, “and I don’t care, as long as you understand this: if you ever hurt anyone or anything I care about again, I will destroy you.”

And then he releases her abruptly and stalks off, and she’s left alone in the library, rubbing her aching wrist and pretending it is the only pain she feels.


	7. Milathos Appreciation Week - Day 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massive liberties taken with history considering the Franco-Spanish War actually ran from 1635 to 1659, and be damned if I’m writing that far out. This operates under the assumption that the war begins in 1632, and that the revolts in Catalonia and Portugal actually _do_ destabilise the Spanish Empire to the point of (tenuous) peace treaties five years in. Writing fic would be a lot easier if I didn’t care about history, wouldn’t it? XD  
>  Posting this one before I second-guess myself too much. I’m good at that.

> _Day 7 - memories are not the key to the past, but the future_

She tries, across the sea, to forget.

England is, as he had predicted, cold and dreary and so very different from her beloved France. She’s not certain at first if this is good or bad, and eventually concludes that it is a little of both. The change does her good in many ways, as for the first time in years she can define herself largely as she chooses, needing to bend to no man’s whims. No one knows her on this side of the sea, or if they do they have not seen fit to remind her of it, and so for now she is able to simply _be_.

News of the war finds its way to London, inevitable as the rains. When she hears about it, she understands: as ever, he puts duty (king and crown and country) first. On the eve of war, the decision might have been easier, even dictated for him, but in peace it would still have been the same. He would never have chosen her.

And so she tries to forget him, tries to forget all the happy times and even the bleak, rage-filled ones, because those only serve as an anchor. She is shackled to her past, bound to him in a manner more absolute than she had ever been to Sarazin or Richelieu or any of the other men who had dictated her days because she had cared for him (still does, and that thought should not smart as much as it does), and this is one lock she cannot pick to win free.

Five years she lives there. She has excellent days, sun and merriment and feeling young and untrammeled in a way she hasn’t in years, but then memory will find her, and melancholy follows, and she catches herself gazing off in the direction of the Continent and wondering more and more often.

He is not dead. She is certain of that on a bone-deep level, visceral and necessary. IF he was dead, then certainly she would know. (She knows what it feels like to think him dead -- that aching hollowness. She _knows_.)

Five years, and then one day the war has ended and she packs her things and bids her English friends (if that is what they are? she hasn’t had those since childhood, if ever, so how would she know?) farewell. She promises to write, surprises herself by meaning every word, and sets out to the harbour.

The past still chains her -- Paris, and him. If she wants to be free, she needs to see them again, to reconcile or make a clean break, to _be certain_.

She stands at the rail, feeling the salt spray kiss her cheeks and watching the familiar docks of Le Havre grow larger, and tries not to feel like she’s coming home.

~ * ~

In the midst of war, he finds it easy to forget her. His days are taken up with strategic councils, with checking after his men, with battles themselves. When he sleeps, which is less often than he knows he ought, it is usually in such a state of exhaustion that if he dreams he does not remember.

And yet he thinks of her all the same, no matter how he may forget. On particularly bad nights, when he's snatched no more than a few hours of sleep for days on end and the men are looking particularly haggard and he can see no way out of this war that does not end with them all dead, he takes solace in the idea that she is well, perhaps even happy. At last, after years of guilt followed by months of hate, he does not begrudge her that. Some nights, when things are particularly bad (Porthos’ teeth gritted as they pry a musket ball from his thigh, d’Artagnan’s young face drawn and haggard with concern, Aramis’ haunted eyes as he says prayers over the dead), he wishes he’d turned from all this and gone with her, but it is only ever a fleeting fancy. He knows who he is; to have gone would have been to live a lie, and they both deserve better.

His place is here, alongside his brothers, with the men who’ve been entrusted to his care. His place is smoke and screams and death, and it is perhaps fitting, when his life has been about trying to redeem himself from those past sins. Duty is the path of a lord; his father had told him that ever since childhood. Everything else must come after. And while Olivier de la Fère may as well have died alongside Anne de Breuil that spring day in Pinon, been buried beside his only brother by birth, the man he is now is no less a servant to duty.

The thought of her is an anchor. It keeps him sane in the face of what he sees, in the face of the men young and old that he buries. He keeps her glove tucked into his doublet, and even if the delicate fabric snags and frays and discolours, it’s a tangible reminder in a far more gentle way than her locket had once been. Where once the memory of her threatened to drag him under beneath the waves, now it steadies him as much as the brothers beside him. Aramis has his God, d’Artagnan has Constance, Porthos (of all of them) has hope. Athos holds his memories and his dreams just as tightly.

The war lasts five years, but it feels like fifty. Their victory -- if it can be called that, ironed out by diplomats in palaces rather than won with strength of arms in the field -- is hollow. He has lost too many, and even if his brothers are still at his side, he knows many others were not so lucky. It is a burden he does not want to carry. (He wonders what she would say, if he told her that.)

The journey across the French countryside was almost as exhausting as the war itself, the pinched faces and hollow eyes attesting to the ravages these folk have felt even away from the front lines. If he were to ask them what they had gone to war for, whether it had been worth it, how would they answer?

_For a fool,_ she tells him in his dreams. _For a fool, for an empty ideal, and of course it’s not worth that. Not when the common man bleeds._ It’s almost enough to drive him to drink.

Paris should not be different, but it is. He wonders whether it’s he or the city that has changed. And though there are councils and ceremonies to attend now he moves through them mechanically. Aramis leaves to return to Douai, Porthos riding along to keep him company, and d’Artagnan gives him a long look before he goes home to Constance. Athos just waves him off and clambers up the stairs to the captain’s rooms, intent on spending an evening with the bottle for the first time in years. Tonight he cannot face what is; perhaps in wine he can find enough of the past to comfort himself, if only for a little time.

He is out of sorts enough to not notice the door to the back ajar until he has pushed into his bedroom; he is out of sorts enough that he reaches for his weapons before he recognises the woman seated in the window. He spares a sudden wild moment to wonder how she got in unnoticed.

“You said,” he manages, when he finds his voice again, “that if I did not come to the crossroads before sundown, we would never see each other again.”

She looks at him for an interminable moment. Her hair is wild, windblown, her eyes bright with things he cannot (dares not) name. And then she smiles, warm and open and welcoming, and in the familiar curve of her mouth he sees yesterday and tomorrow and hope springing up again like the flowers whose scent clings to her even now. “I lied.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOLY CRAP I actually made it through this entire challenge. I’m usually really terrible at follow-through so that says something for me. XD  
> Also I totally have headcanon for _days_ about where this goes from here. Maybe someday I’ll write it. Or just babble about it and never actually write more than snippets, because I do that a lot too ...


	8. Chance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr a month ago. This one was just a quick tag for 2x06 to reconcile a personal headcanon. XD

Years spent surviving by any means necessary have taught her to always watch the details. On the streets and in the Cardinal’s employ alike, details often meant the difference between life and death. And so she lets the fear do what it’s supposed to do, feels adrenaline sharpen her senses even as she clamps down on panic and irritation alike, and focuses on Marmion. It’s been clear from the first the others defer to him; at least here she need look for no shadowy mastermind.

It’s equally clear, from the moment he pushes Aramis out the window, that no one is walking away from this. Marmion is a lunatic, and such men cannot be reasoned with. Unarmed, outmanoeuvred, she has no option but to watch and wait and bide her time, hoping for an opening.

As the coin flies through the air, she watches his hands closely. It’s not about Louis – the king will never take his gamble. But the practised flip is the motion of a man who knows what he’s doing, and this whole scenario reeks of charlatans, and sure enough, the flick of his fingers as he lays the coin on his hand tells her he already knows how it’s fallen. Now it’s a matter of reading Marmion himself and not his hands. Which side would he choose?

He wants to test the king. Louis would undoubtedly choose his own visage. And if Marmion wants to know what the king would do, pressed to the breaking point – whether Louis would walk away from his wife and child – then she knows, without a doubt, which side that coin has landed on.

“Heads,” she says without hesitation.


	9. Ruin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For another prompt from [this AU prompt meme](http://myalchod.tumblr.com/post/117094313773/send-me-a-ship-and-a-number-and-ill-write-a-short) on Tumblr.  
> This one ended up a lot shorter than my other replies courtesy of a 3am burst of inspiration. XD;;

> _prompt #50. going through a divorce au - Milathos_

“I can’t do this anymore.”

She looks at him from beneath heavy lids; even like this, he can feel the judgement in her gaze. “Which ‘this’, precisely?”

“This.” His hand circumscribes the entirety of their situation. Marriage, love, her, all of it. It’s tearing him apart to go, but if he stays they’ll only hurt each other again and again and again, and they both deserve better. “I can’t keep cutting myself on you, hoping that this time something will change.”

The air is weighted with the summer heat, their bodies sticky with sweat, clinging to each other where they meet. She is everything he wants and so much of what he needs and yet he knows if he stays she’ll shatter him (and herself) because it’s who she is. She loves, but she fears it, and to destroy what she cares for before she loses it is her way. He understands that, now, in a way he never had before he’d married her.

He loves, too – commits too deeply, throws himself into it with an intensity that scorches him in the process. He wants too much, feels too much, and that is his own doom. In this, too, they are matched, and one or the other of them must make a clean break before they are both in pieces on the floor.

He’s watched too many times as she flirts with other men, watched and burned and drunk heavily to dull the pain, and when it becomes too much he’s dragged her home, so desperate to claim her and wipe away the memory of other hands on her that at times they don’t even make it to their bedroom. The sex is hot, hard, full of anger and a bitter need and words neither of them is willing to speak. (They don’t really talk anymore. He wonders whether he only imagines that they once did.)

“You still love me,” she says, tracing one manicured nail along his jaw and down his throat. He imagines that if he turned just a little that it would cut him, but he is already bleeding and what would one more wound be?

He knots his fingers in her hair, kisses her, hard and deep and slow. They are self-fulfilling prophecies, falling to ruin. “And it’s not enough.”


	10. Except

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ten minutes of break and a [beautiful heartbreaking headcanon](http://dontbeangrylove.tumblr.com/post/118215191632/headcanon-where-milady-never-sleeps-in-a-chemise) posted on Tumblr and there goes my stupid brain ...

She’s not sentimental. It’s something she can’t afford, when she’s seen what sentiment gets her ( _killed_ , a voice in her head says, and it sounds like the mother she hardly remembers, like Sarazin, like Thomas). She has become as hard and cold as the woman he believed her to be, untouchable and elusive as the shadows that have proven the only home she will ever know. Sunlight and happiness and golden days are a fleeting memory that belongs to a girl she’d never been.

Her clothes are her armour, fine things that she wraps herself in to become _Milady_ , to put away Anne de la Fère (nothing but a damning lie) forever. Silks and damasks and velvets, all the fine things she’d yearned for as a child, and while she luxuriates in them they mean _nothing_ and are only tools. Her clothes are armour, her tongue more of a weapon than her blades, and there is no softness to her ( _except_ ).

She becomes a creature of night and shadows and whispers, keeps odd hours in odder places, but in the grey light before morning, when the whole world feels surreal, she allows herself the briefest of moments to dream.

When she was younger, the shirt would have been something unspeakably valuable, smooth linen and delicate stitches that disappeared into the fabric. These days, it’s nothing, especially compared to the finery she decks herself in. And yet she knows it better than any of those other garments – knows, as well as the scars on her skin, the wear: one of the ties ripped where they’d grown impatient and he’d tugged it off without undoing the knot, fraying along the collar and hem, faint greyish-purple stains from early berries dappling the cuffs. There is a story to each mark, just like those scars, but she does not think of them ( _except_ ).

The scent of summer and sun and the man she’d ( _loved_ ) been a fool for no longer clings to the linen, but in those soft grey hours she strips off her armour and pulls it on nonetheless, wraps herself in blankets (in memories she denies), and sleeps.


	11. Just One More - B-Side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For an anon request on Tumblr for Athos' POV for [Just One More](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3810733). It will make a great deal less sense if you haven't read that first.  
> I may be developing a habit of Athos castigating himself for being a fool. (It's accurate. He's just far from the only one being foolish on this show.)

_‘Fool,’_ he thinks after, because he can’t stop thinking about that night – and, later still, _‘thrice-damned fool,’_ because he should know better, but the admonishments do nothing.

Things should never have reached that point between them. And yet sense and should-be are so often mere afterthoughts when it comes to her, because she is more heady than the most potent spirit he’s ever tasted, clouds his mind more than wine and war alike. She has been a weakness from the first lie and will be one until her last breath, because when he is around her reason ceases to have meaning, and all that remains are the passions he tries so hard to tame.

He’d wanted this once, more than anything, back when he’d been a fool yet unknowing and loved a dream. He’d held her against him, soft and sweet, closed his eyes and drunk deep of the scent of flowers and imagined the flat stomach beneath his hand rounding with a child – imagined their children, filling the quiet halls of his family home with laughter and warmth.

That dream is dead, buried, burned to ash, and yet when she tells him, it haunts him once more, like the ghost of flowers on his pillow.

_‘Fool, fool, stupid naïve fool.’_

He believes her. After everything, against his will and the sense that seems to elude him, he believes the words true, if only because there had been a raw honesty in her words he’d only ever heard once before. It doesn’t mean he wants to believe – god knows he wants nothing of the sort – and yet for all that he is a fool, it is not he who lies, even to himself. (He wants, even now, and the intensity of that wanting terrifies him more than he will ever confess.)

And yet he does not go. He _cannot_ go, even before Tréville’s hand is there on his arm, because he cannot forsake one duty for another (and though he had already failed his duty to her years before, that thought is no less a coward’s refuge than being glad the choice was taken from him). He thinks of her there, waiting and wondering, and thinks that perhaps she too already knows, and it is no consolation. She will hate him for it. He deserves no less.

And yet in the depths of war he wakes sometimes to the ghosts of high laughter and fields of flowers and, though he should know better, _hopes_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not sure if this is at all what you had in mind, my dear anon – the original piece was so deeply Milady’s that it was surprisingly hard to write from Athos’ side. If it’s not what you were hoping for or if you there are questions you’d hoped to have answered that aren’t, please feel free to let me know. I am more than happy to babble about things at the slightest provocation.


	12. Downfall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For an anon on Tumblr, who asked for #31 from the [AU prompt list](http://myalchod.tumblr.com/post/117094313773/send-me-a-ship-and-a-number-and-ill-write-a-short), saying "i maaay have seen pretty woman a few too many times".
> 
> Unlike you, dearest Anon, I have never seen _Pretty Woman_ , so I’m fairly sure this is nowhere in that vicinity. XD But it was fun to write!

> _prompt #31. prostitute/client au_

“Milady.” The Cardinal bows over her hand, lips brushing over the back just like any of her would-be swains, but there’s only cool calculation in his eyes as he guides her to a corner. He’s got a job for her – she knows that look – and sure enough, once they’re out of earshot he says, “I’ve someone I need you to handle.”

Her brows lift. “Permanently?”

“No need to stain your pretty hands, my dear.” His smile is thin and humourless. “No, I just need him deep enough that he can’t expose this without ruining himself.”

That makes her smile in turn, a lazy feline curve of crimson-painted lips. “A seduction. That should be amusing. Who is it, then?”

He nods across the room, indicating a man about her own age, with the sharp kind of eyes she knows from long-ago encounters with the law. He’s not unattractive, this target of hers, and younger than many she’s taken into her bed. If she’s lucky, he may even be persuaded to attend to her, something her regulars are rarely inclined towards.

“Police?”

“Mmm. Lieutenant Olivier d’Athos.”

“Why me? He looks the type to want an ingenue rather than a soubrette.”

The Cardinal’s grim expression doesn’t waver, for all that his voice is mild. “Because you have too much to lose if you don’t succeed, Milady,” he murmurs before leaving her alone.

_‘He’s right, damn him,’_ she thinks, as he leaves her to study the lieutenant in peace. Investigation too deeply into the Cardinal’s business would surely lead to the secrets bought and sold and traded in her bed, and such exposure would be her ruin. This may not have been the life she dreamed of as a girl, but it’s a better life than what she’d had then, even if the cage is simply a gilded one. It’s a life, and she has no intention of giving up what freedom she’s managed to eke out of it.

She exhales slowly, forcing the tension out of her body along with the breath, and pushes away from the wall – hooded eyes, mysterious smile, intent in her stride as she moves towards him. He looks up at her motion, alert and wary, and their eyes meet –

Her smile widens at the surprise she sees there, the flare of attraction that follows. He doesn’t know it yet, but she has him.

~ * ~

He comes back. They always do.

He comes back, asks if she’s free – he knows what she is, at least on the surface, and does her the courtesy of not pretending otherwise. And yet when the door is closed he is as attentive as she could have hoped, intent on her pleasure in a way that seems to have little to do with asserting his own power. She’s had clients who brought her off before, but it has always been about them – proving themselves in some fashion, controlling her reactions. When he looks up from between her splayed thighs, his bearded chin wet and his blue eyes alight, there is such uncomplicated joy there she almost forgets where they are.

_‘You’re a dangerous man, lieutenant,’_ she thinks as she pulls him up for a kiss, winding her fingers in his hair and her legs about his hips, but in this moment she can’t quite make herself care.

The Cardinal is pleased; she can see that when she meets him next to relay the latest of what her other clients have said. She tries not to dwell on the fact that she’s ruining a good man, drawing him into this web.

In her line of work, she can’t afford scruples.

~ * ~

“Annie,” Flea says, in an entirely too smug tone, “has a repeat caller. What is it now, eight times?”

“Five.” Anne grimaces as she toys with her straw absently. “I think he’s a romantic, which is the worst sort of nuisance.”

“And yet you haven’t put him off.” Sofia eyes her shrewdly from the other side of the table. “You're going soft on us, Annie.”

“Hardly,” she retorts, but it’s mostly because softness is another thing she can’t afford. She hasn’t had the heart to send Athos packing yet, but he’s also different from her usual clientele. Milady de Winter sees some of the richest and most powerful men in the city; she hadn’t had any reason other than the Cardinal’s initial admonishment to let an earnest police lieutenant into her bed – not after the first time, because once would have been enough to compromise him. But she’s let him come back, more than once, because he’s different – because she doesn’t have to and probably shouldn’t.

She’s always been very good at wanting things she can’t have.

~ * ~

“Anne,” she says when she can breathe again, and his fingers still on her bare back. She can’t see his face, but she can visualise the perplexed expression there clearly.

“Sorry?”

She’s not sure why she said it, only that it suddenly matters that she have this for herself, separate it a little further from her work and the parade of other men (even if that’s impossible, when it’s why he’s here in the first place, why she’s taken him to bed to begin with). He knows what she is, she knows the same, and yet the worshipful tenderness of his touch makes it so easy to forget, in moments like this, how easily he could destroy her. And yet –

“What,” she asks, making her tone purposefully light, “did you think Milady was my name?”

He’s quiet for so long she pulls back, twisting to look at him. There’s something intense and indecipherable in his eyes, something she can’t (let herself) explore. And then he smiles, that slow hesitant smile from when they’d first met, the one that makes her feel like she’s his entire world.

“Anne,” he echoes.

She likes (far too much) the way her name tastes on his tongue.


	13. Indiscretion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The original prompt I got for this ("Au: milathos one night stand and it turns out to be one of their children's new teacher for that year at school") confused me, but the anon came back and clarified: "I meant either Anne sleeps with athos as a one night stand and he turns out to be her child's new teacher for the new year. Or vice versa where Anne is the teacher and athos is the father, sorry about the confusion."
> 
> I tried to write it without crossing into territory I’ve covered elsewhere, at any rate, so there is teacher!Milady, dad!Athos, and I’ve swiped Raoul’s name out of the books because I’m lazy. Not sure how I feel about it (I do that a lot, I guess XD;; ), but I hope the requester-anon liked it!

It had become something of a tradition, over the years – one last hurrah before going back to buttoned-up respectability and the school term. But her friends from university and her first years of teaching have abandoned her one by one, to marriage or committed relationships or other parts of the world, and while she’d made a stab at the same it hadn’t been for her. If the shambles of her last relationship are anything to go by, then she’s looking forward to spinsterhood, which would be just fine if it didn’t feel so damned lonely right now.

Which is why she’s sitting alone in a dive bar far enough from her flat that no one knows her, determinedly working her way towards drunk. She’s feeling far too old for her thirty-two years tonight, too old and maudlin and disappointed, but it’s nothing an unhealthy amount of alcohol and a tumble between the sheets won’t cure. Tomorrow she can be miserably hung over, Monday she can go back to being proper Mme. de Breuil, but tonight she’ll be damned if she’s anything but Anne.

She’s halfway through her third gin and tonic and trying to dissuade an unwelcome admirer without moving when a voice from over her shoulder says, in tones of steel-edged menace, “Are you bothering my lady, monsieur?”

The man before her stammers an apology and hurries off, and she swivels on her barstool to meet a pair of winter-sky eyes. Their owner gives a faint half-smile and inclines his head. “I apologise if my presumption is unwelcome, mademoiselle. Monsieur Bisset has needed warning off before.”

She looks him over frankly from behind the rim of her glass. He’s not a sight she minds – is rather her type, broad shoulders filling out a dark dress shirt nicely, tousled brown hair just a shade too long, a glint of sardonic humour in his gaze. “It was most welcome,” she counters with a slow smile of her own, attention flicking down ever so briefly (good, no ring, nor the shadow of where one has been removed, so she can do this without feeling guilty), “and even more so if you’ll let me buy you a drink in thanks.”

~ * ~

They end up at her place – she asks, not caring if it’s too forward, because it’s the 21st century and she’s a liberated woman and if he can’t handle her making the first move then she isn’t bloody well interested after all. (He can, and she’s glad, because the way he devours her mouth while they’re waiting for a cab makes her _ache_.) The sex is hard and fast and messy and just what she’d needed to burn away her melancholy, and she’s honestly not expecting anything after. But he comes back from disposing of the condom and sinks down at the edge of the bed, turning his head to nip at the inside of her bare thigh, and she can’t quite hold back a yelp of surprise. It’s unexpected, but not at all unwelcome.

He looks back up at the sound, those eyes more blue in the dimness of her bedroom. The hand on her hip burns, ignites a new fire as it traces abstract patterns there. “No?” he asks, the words a warm puff against still-slick skin, and she makes an inarticulate sound somewhere between needy and frustrated and twists her fingers into his hair to yank him back in. His breath shudders out, pupils blowing to eclipse blue, and she shivers at the unequivocal pleasure that washes over his face.

“Yes,” it’s more than half a moan, and her fingers tighten and push him down, down, down, and it’s all the prompting he needs.

~ * ~

He leaves in the small hours of the morning, and she musters up enough energy to see him out and lock up behind him. Only when he’s gone does she realise they’d never even exchanged names.

Sunday is lazy, less miserable than she expected. She’s sore, but it’s a pleasant ache – one she hasn’t felt in too long.

She wonders whether she’d be able to find him again, if she went back to that bar, and whether even considering that is wise.

As the school term starts and she buttons her blouses all the way up and pins her hair demurely back, she concludes that it would be a terrible idea. Summer indiscretions must remain there.

~ * ~

“Raoul!”

The strident voice echoes through the corridor, and she sticks her head out the classroom door, peering around. Raoul d'Athos is next on her parent-teacher conference list, and while it’s not an uncommon first name she suspects the man outside is calling for her student.

“Raoul, where – _oh_.”

_‘Oh indeed,’_ she thinks inanely as the man rounds the corner and their eyes meet, because she knows him – well, after a fashion. (A terribly inconvenient and inappropriate fashion, if what she suspects is true and this is M. d'Athos, because she can’t stop the snapshots of memory that flicker through her mind, nor the accompanying flush.)

And there comes his son around the corner, and it _is_ her student, and she forces down the grimace even as she extends a hand to the father. The rasp of his calluses against her palm triggers a visceral memory of those fingers against her skin and she fights the sudden urge to yank her hand back before she burns. _‘This could be awkward.’_

“M. d'Athos.” She manages to make the greeting perfectly proper.

“Mme. de Breuil.” Her name is utterly neutral on his tongue, and yet there’s heat in those blue eyes when they meet hers – heat wholly inappropriate for where they are here, for who they are, for the boy clinging to his other hand and the classroom behind her and the conversation ahead of them. But it seems she’s not the only one remembering.

Awkward may not end up covering the half of it.


	14. Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Literal five-minutes-on-break drabblet just to get it out of my head, because my brain doesn't let things go. IDEK what this was. >_>

All men are alike, selfish creatures with no care but for their own skins, who see women – especially women like her – as worthless and beneath them. She had been lulled into dreaming otherwise for a time, seeing herself in the soft focus of his gaze; the deepest cut is not his lack of belief, but the realisation that all she’s had these precious months was nothing but a lie.

Precious – how the word burns. Those days are worth as little to her now as she patently had been to him. Dreams will serve her ill if she is to survive. Dreams, she remembers (in the cold light of day), are not food or shelter or clothing; they are a luxury for the wealthy and the mad, and she cannot even afford madness.

She had thought she could be something other than a whore’s daughter, in those dreams, but some stains will never wash clean.

(She will drown them in blood instead.)


	15. Stitch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For ScoutLover, who asked for "Athos and Milady (duh) #24 – Orly? Because all the sass with these two. All of it." for [this meme](http://myalchod.tumblr.com/post/129893343776/send-me-a-number-and-two-characters-get-a). Sometime post S2, and I don’t even know why these two are working together so just go with it? Less ‘o rly’ and more sass because reasons.

“Your stitches are terrible.”

He doesn’t look up from his work, busy pulling the needle through torn flesh, but he can feel the weight of her eyes on him. “If you managed not to get yourself carved up, then you wouldn’t need to worry about them,” he says sharply, because it’s easier than thinking about what might’ve happened if she’d been a hair’s breadth slower.

She snorts in disgust, swallows down a small pained sound as the motion jostles her injury. “If you’d done your job properly, I wouldn’t be needing them in the first place. Whatever happened to defending women, musketeer?” On her lips, the title is mocking.

Athos says nothing, frowning in concentration as he sets the last stitch, knots the thread off carefully and cuts it short. “Since when do you need defending?” he fires back as he straightens.

A bark of laughter is followed by a grimace as she wraps one arm around her ribs, wincing. “Fair,” she concedes, and despite how white her face is the gleam of humour in her eyes is far more pronounced than the pain.

She turns so he can get to the other wound, and as he peels away bloodied linen, he finds himself smiling just a little. “Besides,” he mutters as he focusses on cleaning this gash, “your stitches are even worse.”


End file.
